Building an Army
__TOC__ 'First Steps' If you are playing the game for the first time, the best possible way to start off is to follow the tutorial and collect your quests as you complete them. Early on in the game, you may find wood to be the most necessary resource, making sawmills should be your first priority. Following that, you'll need (in this order) ore, food and stone. It's not a bad idea to build these four in a 4:3:2:2 ratio. For every four sawmills, build three mines, two farms and two quarries. Later on in the game, you'll most likely need more ore than wood, and eventually won't need stone at all (unless you decide to build catapults). For now, focus on the ratio above, and supplement it by conquering wildernesses to boost your production. Don't forget to occasionally upgrade those wildernesses by abandoning the old ones and conquering new ones from time to time. 'What you need to know' * Building troops not only uses Resources but also free population space. Your Population grows again, just like your Resources, as long as you keep your Population Trend stable or upward. * Troops you build will eat Food, lots of it. If you end up having negative production you will eventually have to start farming Barbarian Camps. * Every Troop type has prerequisites that you need to fulfill before you are able to recruit these. * Keep your troops in the Sanctuary if you are not online or are weak in comparison to other players. Resources grow faster than rebuilding a whole army. * Building multiple Barracks will let you recruit units faster. Check this formulae and this one. * In order to supply a strong, effective army, you need food...but you do not completely need to litter all your cities with just farms, you just need to locate your city where there are a good amount of barbarian camps you can conquer, and a few farms (people you can loot resources from). Without food, you cannot have an army, but without wood/ore you cannot build an army, so don't think you need to only build farms. * When you get to a high enough might, say 3 million, you don't need as many sawmills or mines or quarries. You can replace them all with farms and just farm other lower might players to get resources. (Active players can be better, especially in alliances, because they beg for resources which other members give, therefore you can get more. So instead of getting 5 mill food from an inactive player you can get 100 mill food along with other resources from active ones). Another strategy involves having cities devoted to one resource, and then have one city house their main army. You need about 7 level-9 cottages, a market and the other single-use buildings, then use the rest of the space for barracks. This allows troops to train very quickly and have large numbers in your queues. * Try to build 5 lv1 Barracks in the beginning and then upgrade one of these to lv4 so you gain access to Archers. * Get Archers before you really start building an Army. * Read the important Research types to know what you need for high survivability. * Get at least one Knight which doesn't have a role assigned, ideally you should have three Knights. Knights that have a role assigned can't be used to attack. * To faster build troops assign a Knight to the role of Marshal. You can do this in the Knights Hall. * Upgrade your Knights Hall so that your Knights gain experience faster, and assign the skill points regularly to make better use of them. * Start attacking with lv1 and lv2 Barbarian Camps to get a feeling how Battle works. * Eventually, if your city has level 9, or even level 10, Food Wilds... And if you your city has all level 9, or even level 10, farms... Eventually Your Army size will grow big enough to make food income a negative number... My suggestion is real simple, "Learn to deal with it early on, because if you don't... You will either will not know what to do when the time comes... Or you will be like some players that refuse to go negative and always will be short on troops." The Top ranking person overall is probably sitting at a minimum of -1 million food per hour, that is just a rough estimate, others are higher and some are lower. (Now with four cities, -1 million food/hr is quite common and the top players will probably have at least -30 million food per hour). 'Getting there' * Even though there are many Units in the game, here are the high priority ones - get your research up so you can build these: ** Supply Troops/Supply Wagons: Carry the plundered resources. Once you have enough Archers, you will automatically have enough capacity though, so you don't need too many of these. ** Archers: The main Unit type you will ever use on Wildernesses and Barbarian Camps. also since they are cheaper on food Achers are good for defence too. ** Hev. Cavalry: You will need these only when you can afford to burn alot of ore, and need to attack strong players. (also good for barbs lvl1-3 as no looses occur) ** Cavalry: Used to farm low level (1-4) Barbarian Camps due to their high speed. (It is better to use plain cavalry because they are faster and have a much greater load capacity) * You should be farming lv3 Barbarian Camps now, which means you have been raising your Research and working towards the Supply Wagons and Heavy Cavalry. * Keep producing Archers till you have 30.000 of them. * You should definitely have three Knights by now. * Using 10.000 Archers each you can farm lv4 Barbarian Camps without having any losses (provided your knight is around 75+ combat) * Keep an eye on your Food. Make sure you have enough reserves if you are not going to be able to play for a prolonged time. ''So what units should I Build? '' Since many players often ask what troops to build, I figured a brief summary of each troop type would be helpful. Personal preference and style of attacks should influence what units you produce. The following summaries are to HELP you build your army. *Supply Troops - Easy to produce in mass numbers, and having a large load (amount they can carry), supply troops are a good way to transport resources to your allies, and back from cities you have plundered. *Militiamen - in small numbers, these troops are weak. However, a few thousand can overcome caltrops, and even wall-mounted crossbows with ease. Like Supply Troops, they are easy to produce. you should have at least 20k militiamen at all times they are useful to clear defensive units in war. *Scouts - This unit is essential. You need scouts to find out what to send against an opponent. Also easy to produce, scouts die easily, so you may need to mass-produce this unit. However, the information they gather will make them worth the resources. Most of the time, 500 scouts is plenty for any human opponent, so 500 scouts is a good target size when you are starting out. As you get bigger and want to attack stronger people, then you will need more. On some of the older domains it is very common to scout with 90k+ scouts, especially if your opponent is active and strong. *scouts are very important it is best to have about 250k in your main city as with a level 11 rally point and an aura of conquest you can send 225k scouts in one wave i doubt many people would use one of the aura's on a scout attack but you never know *Pikeman -They aren't very strong in any category, making them easy to eliminate. However, they are strong against Cavalry and Heavy Cavalry with some archers to shoot Cavalry and Heavy Cavalry from far, and are somewhat easy to produce(with quite abit of wood), so players with a small army may find a use for them.(Best in defence with 40-50k pikes with 90-100k archers you will kill alot of Hev Cav/Cav). *DO NOT ATTACK WITH PIKES. i would post you all a report but to show you how useless they are in attack i will just describe what happened 200k pikes sent in on an attack against someone that had they attacked my pikes i would of easily won against all of my pikes died and i only killed i think 20k of his cavalry (all my research is level 10). in defense though they are awesome against cavalry and heavy cavalry. *Note...Sending just pikes will not kill much if he got much horses..i use this setup > 1k mm 100 scouts 5k archers 1k Cavalry 1k Heavy Cavalry 500 swords and all else pikes...i have lv 12 rally so i can tons to troops..i killed mills of cavs easily with this method.. *Swordsmen - This unit is a strong unit, and is valuable for two reasons. First, they are still somewhat easy to produce, and second, they are also effective against Archers, which are common in player's armies.(Very good for defending archers) *Archers - Easily the most popular unit in the game, Archers attack from a range, giving them an advantage against the units listed above. However, they are not as easy to produce as the previous units, making them somewhat annoying to replace. *Cavalry - This is the unit you use when you need to hit a target fast. However, with that speed comes a lack of defense, so you may find yourself replacing them quite often. *Supply Wagons - these units are very valuable. They can carry massive amounts of resources and have a high defense, allowing them to survive rough battles. These units are well worth their higher production costs *Heavy Cavalry - These units can put a big dent in your resources, but they are very powerful and are good for taking out Spiked Barriers, which allows your Supply Wagons into your enemies city unopposed. Heavy Cavalry are also fairly fast considering their strength, they take a fair amount of ore...but think about all the ore you can farm with a huge army of Heavy Cavalry.... Heavy cavalry are quickly becoming the weapon of choice for high-powered alliances. An assault of 90K archers just doesn't have the power to do much damage. An assault of 60K heavy cav will utterly destroy any force that is not seriously loaded with pikes or massive numbers of archers. Also, a large force of heavy cavalry can farm on its own with much greater speed than archers, due in part to their high load capacity. They take a while to build and require massive amounts of ore, so heavy cavalry is not something to lean on unless you have the resources to continue building heavy cavalry in spite of losses. *Ballista - The first siege weapon you'll gain access to, these units are effective as long as they are well-supported by the infantry units and cavalry. They have a high production cost however, so smaller players shouldn't try to mass-produce them. Ballista are also a good weapon to have for Defense. As Defense, they will act as Wall Mounted Crossbows. They are great since Wall Mounted Crossbows max out at a certain point, so 2+k Ballista to that defense you gain that much more Wall mounted Crossbow like defenses :) *Battering Rams - These units can take a lot of punishment, which is good since they are also hard to make. They can tear down defenses quickly though, so they are a sound investment if you're attacking cities. 90k of these will open just about any city, but Heavy Cavalry can as well unless defender has more pike. *Catapults - These units eat the most (250 food per hour per unit) making them hard to keep in a city. Their massive attack and range make them quite deadly to enemy units though, so the trade off may be worth it. Note: if you refuse to upgrade to a level 10 barracks the only way to get this unit is by winning Siege Volunteers from Merlin's Magical Tokens. However, this item often produces units that consume at least a 75000 food per hour. They need AT LEAST 3 DIVINE INSPERATIONS TO MAKE. * Hard to build: takes city's population of 10 to 1 catapult *Archer only requires a ratio of 2 to 1 and a Ballista of 5 to1 which means you can have twice as many Ballista or 5 times as many Archers but won;t kill Cats unless have twice as many Ballista or fives times as many Archers *Food consumption rates are also to be considered when: 5 archers eat 45 2 Ballista eat 100 1 Cat eats 250 *Cats at Rally Point are unbeatable for more info visit my page and leave a question or comment : ) Category:Battle Category:Activities Category:Troops Category:Strategy Category:Combat